Cloud and Mobility - why it is necessary

Successful companies know that a well-trained, highly motivated and efficiently connected field force is critical to their continued growth and success. To compete and win, sales, marketing, tech support, customer service, repair, and other field staff must have anywhere, anytime access to corporate data and applications using any device.

The bottom-line benefits of empowering your field force with the information they need, when and where they need it, include:

Dramatic boosts in field force productivity

The ability to deliver extraordinary customer service

Increased customer loyalty

A competitive edge defined by the ability to close business or solve customer problems on the spot

Reduced total cost of ownership due to deployment of smaller form factor devices and reduced connection costs

Improved inventory management

Reduced administrative costs

Expedited billing and cash flow

Across every industry group mobile and wireless field force automation solutions are delivering significant results like these. In financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, retail and hospitality, transportation, public sector and more, these solutions are tilting the playing field in favor of organizations with the foresight to implement them.

With a quarter of all corporate workers already connecting to their networks from remote locations, and with that number expected to grow dramatically over the next few years, the message is unmistakable: mobile and wireless e-Business, or m-Business, solutions are a critical success factor. The question, then, is not whether to implement m-Business solutions, but rather how to implement them.

Source of Image: Microsoft Mobile-Cloud overview and Strategy

A good Mobile Business platform provides mobile workers with "always available" access to their data and applications. As a result, workers remain highly productive by working either on or offline, accessing the information they need, when they need it. They can execute transactions in real time, or queue them up offline to reduce communications costs while increasing application and battery performance.

Best of breed Solutions also offer a customizable framework on which to build industry-specific m-Business applications to help speed development of solutions. The bottom line: By automating what has been traditionally a paper-based process, organizations benefit from enhanced productivity, reduced redundancy and fewer errors.

Ability to scale to support both field force growth and the increasing number of network connected devices

Ability to extend your corporate portal to mobile users working on a variety of PCs, handhelds and other computing devices

With competition growing fiercer each day, companies that can arm their sales representatives with timely information on customers, prospects, competitors and market trends stand the best chance to win, retain and increase business.